


Fast Times and Slow Drives

by cactustree



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode: s01e14 Gender Bender, Season 1, pre-UST
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-10 16:55:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28370490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cactustree/pseuds/cactustree
Summary: What she says: “I’m sorry we didn’t catch them.” What she doesn’t say: And I’m sorry it was my fault. What she says: “I’m sorry I almost got myself killed.” What she doesn’t say: And I’m sorry you had to save me.~Post-ep to 01x14 “Gender Bender.” Brief references to “Deep Throat,” “Squeeze,” “Ghost in the Machine,” “Eve,” and “Ice.”
Comments: 4
Kudos: 18





	Fast Times and Slow Drives

**Author's Note:**

> This was basically me trying to make sense of this nonsense episode, but I think I just ended up confusing myself more. Anyway I hope you like it.

“Mulder, we have no evidence to support the claim that the Kindred were extraterrestial in nature. None. And I’m not putting anything in my case report that isn’t supported by evidence.”

Scully looks across at Mulder as she speaks, while Mulder gazes straight ahead at the wide expanse of rural Massachusetts stretched out in front of them, one hand draped over the steering wheel, the other buried in the bag of sunflower seeds tucked into the center console. After a moment of digging, he pulls out a small handful and tosses them into his mouth.

“So how do you explain the crop circle?” he asks, between the loud cracks of the seeds’ outer shells breaking under his teeth. The sound used to drive Scully mad, but lately she’s begun to find it comforting.  
  


“There could be any number of explanations for the crop circle,” she says. “A weather event, animal activity. Most crop circles are found to be man-made. Hoaxes. For all we know, the Kindred could have made it themselves, as a distraction, or—or to confuse the investigation. They were harboring a murderer, and they knew we were on to them. They must have known we’d come here.”

“So, what, they came back here, took the time to make a crop circle just to throw us off, and then disappeared into thin air?” Mulder’s words are picking up speed, his eyes darting between the road and Scully. “It doesn’t make any sense. You said it yourself, Scully: they have no means of transportation. How did they get there and back so quickly, and then disappear? The only explanation is that they have some kind of aircraft—or, more likely, spacecraft. It would account for their quick movements, the vanishing act, _and_ the crop circle.”

Scully closes her eyes. Both of them have been up all night, but for Mulder, the idea that they’ve been chasing a community of murderous sex-changing aliens who narrowly eluded capture by escaping in their spaceship is as good as a full night’s sleep and a strong cup of coffee. Scully, by contrast, feels wilted and fuzzy, almost hungover, and Mulder’s rapid-fire theorizing is syphoning her little remaining energy.

She startles when she feels a warm hand on top of hers, and her eyes snap open as though jolted by an electric shock. She looks over to find Mulder studying her, his eyes darkened with concern.

“Watch the road, Mulder,” she murmurs, pulling her hand away from his.

“What’s wrong, Scully?”

“Nothing’s wrong. I’m just tired. It’s been a long night.”

Mulder’s gaze drifts back to the windshield, his hand drifts back to the center console, and they drive through the hayfields in silence. Scully stares out the window, idly rubbing the back of her hand where Mulder touched it. She thinks about Brother Andrew outside the hotel, how she stood with her gun drawn, a clear shot, yet unable to move a muscle as he approached her, eyes locked on hers like an industrial-strength magnet. She thinks about Brother Andrew in the bedroom in Steveston, moving on her like a predator, though nothing in his demeanor threatened violence—it didn’t have to, because she could do nothing to resist him. Scully told Mulder she didn’t remember what happened, but it wasn’t true, not really. The memories are hazy, but they’re there, every second of that strange, disturbing encounter: not only does she remember, but she’s certain she will never forget.

What she doesn’t remember is why, or how. While it was happening, it felt as natural, as essential, as breathing—and when Mulder pulled her away, for an instant, before she started to recover her senses, she felt as though she were drowning.

She didn’t tell Mulder any of this. She couldn’t, not while they were sitting in the parked car with their paper cups of coffee and he was looking at her and trying not to look at her, acting too normal and not normal enough. Instead she deftly changed the subject, and then, mercifully, they got the call that brought them to the hospital to interview Michael, and then the credit card hit—finally a tangible lead, something to pull this case back onto the rails it had careened off of around the time that Mulder had left her out on Steveston’s main street while he went into the feed store.

It didn’t stay on the rails for long. The night left them both with blows to the head and no suspect in custody, and now, as Mulder drives them through the sun-drenched hayfields, leaving Steveston and any hope of closing this case in the rearview mirror, Scully absently fingers the sore spot on her temple where she was struck with her own gun.

“Mulder,” she says, and it’s only after he turns to her with his eyebrows quirked, silently inviting her to continue, that she realizes she doesn’t know what she’s trying to say. No words come to mind, just a swirl of emotions she can’t articulate. Eventually, she settles on “I’m sorry.”

He frowns. “You’re sorry? For what?”

What she says: “I’m sorry we didn’t catch them.” What she doesn’t say: _And I’m sorry it was my fault._ What she says: “I’m sorry I almost got myself killed.” What she doesn’t say: _And I’m sorry you had to save me_.

Belying the sincerity of her words, he smiles. “C’mon, Scully, I almost get myself killed every week. How many times have you saved my ass? Remember Ellens Air Base?”

Despite herself, she smiles too. “Remember Tooms?”

“Remember Eurisko?”

“Remember the Eves?”

“Remember Alaska?”

“We both almost got killed in Alaska,” she counters, though she knows he was in more danger than she was: locked in that storage room, under everyone’s suspicion because he was too stubborn, too untrusting, to prove he wasn’t infected—until they were alone, and he allowed himself to trust her. His trust had saved both of them that day.

Thinking back to that case helps to lift the burden of this one from Scully’s shoulders. She’s still deeply unsettled by everything that happened, still mortified at the memory of Mulder bursting in on her about to do “the wild thing,” as he’d so delicately put it—but she wasn’t in her right mind; she knows that, and she knows that Mulder knows it too. They haven’t discussed it in any detail, and she suspects they never will, but the understanding hangs between them like a tangible thing, anchoring them to each other like their hands on each other’s spines in that storage room in Alaska.

Brother Andrew did something to her. Scully may never know what it was—whether it was something mysterious and otherworldly, as Mulder surely believes, or something quantifiable, chemical, a drug of some kind, as Scully herself is inclined to think—but she can feel the urgency to find all the answers fading with every mile they put between themselves and Steveston.

Scully doesn’t believe the Kindred are aboard a spaceship, but she knows, somehow, that they are far away. She senses their distance as surely as she feels Mulder’s presence beside her. The haze is lifting; she is beginning to feel like herself again.

This time, when Mulder reaches over to squeeze her hand, she doesn’t pull away.


End file.
